There is nothing worse, at least in the world of sports, than calling someone a "bad" fan. I'm a bad fan, and you likely are as well, unless you happen to be the kind of person who refers to other people as bad fans. I'm OK with it, and you should be too. While baseball is getting most of the attention right now, the assessment of fan sincerity is not limited to baseball, as mainstream sports are a year-round thing. Deadspin and Grantland have been making fun of St. Louis Cardinals fans for weeks now, so I'll leave that to them, but suffice it to say that they're probably not unjustified in doing so. Cardinals fans, or at least some of them, are precisely the kind of people who judge others based on how fervently they cheer for their team.

So what makes a bad fan? It’s more like, what doesn’t? Depending on who you ask, bad fan behaviors include, but are not limited to, the following: Arriving to the game late. Leaving the game early when your team is losing. Not wearing enough team gear. Abandoning the team when the season is unsalvageable. Watching anything else when your team is playing. "Disrespecting" the sport, whatever the sport may be. Supporting a team by "jumping on the bandwagon." The list is endless. Odds are, you've already done something that would qualify you as a "bad" fan. Most of us have, because, for some people, if you're not shaping your breathing patterns to mimic your team's fight song, you're off the bus. Honestly, unless you follow a carefully scripted list of parameters, there are plenty of people who will label you a "bad" fan.

Actually, it's easier to define what makes a "good" fan. The first step is self-proclamation. If a group of people label themselves as "the best fans in xxx sport," well, by God, they must be. The second (and final) step is sanctimony. Specifically, the use of that sanctimony to judge others as human beings based on their level of dedication to a team. It can take many forms, from the "Oh, us Cards fans are just good, home-grown folks who happen to have appointed ourselves the stewards of 'good' baseball" faux-humbleness to the "Tawmmy and the Pats are the fackin' best!" outright brashness. If you don't meet their very specific standards, it's almost as though you're doing the team (and the sport as a whole) a disservice with your half-assed rooting. We get it all the time here in DC. "Oh, DC is such a bad baseball town," people say, ignoring the fact that the Nationals have only been around since 2005. Reasonably speaking, that would make the oldest fan born after the team's arrival about 8 years old. But no, I'm a "bad" fan for having "chosen" to like the team, rather than having my fandom bestowed upon me by divine provenance. Ha, imagine that, moving somewhere and rooting for the local team. I mean, who even does that? I also take flak for being a Chicago Bears fan in DC, because, like Tea Partiers and the words out of Kanye West's mouth, "good" fans make no sense.

Fandom, at the fundamental level, is tribalism — in a good way (mostly). We use sports teams to divide and separate ourselves into camps, because such is human nature. The "us versus them" theme is pervasive at every level of humanity and, as far as it goes, sports are a relatively harmless way for it to manifest itself (ignoring things like soccer riots, but ha ha, soccer). It gets ridiculous when those tribes use the "good fan versus bad fan" rhetoric to subdivide themselves into further, smaller tribes. It's almost as though we aren't satisfied with the knowledge that millions of others support our cause — we can't feel secure without joining an even smaller group that exists solely to judge those who don't support our cause quite hard enough.